Also think it's worth leaving the bubble sometimes, thanks for posting this.

I agree with being suspicious around Bitfinex/Tether, and how they can impact price. Having more US T-bills than Australia.

Bitcoin Cash was censored from 2 of the main subreddits, but Ver maintains control over bitcoin.com, arguably more valuable when it comes to derailing normies.

There was an "original spirit" of bitcoin as decentralized P2P cash, and those who had an easier time believing in it early experienced it that way. I remember finding a video of Andreas Antonopoulos where he promoted zero conf transactions when Lightning wasn't available.

Satoshi originally intended for the nSequence field in the transactions to be used in order to avoid having to publish all transactions to the blockchain: https://lightningwiki.net/index.php?title=Satoshi%27s_Vision It was later realized that miners could be bribed to mine an old transaction state, thereby stealing funds one of the 2 out-of-band participants.

I'm a bit put-off by ETFs and other IOU-versions of Bitcoin, but I think it's just a way for Bitcoin adoption to increase. Hopefully we can make it easier and easier to do proper self-custody.

Satoshi Nakamoto himself added the 1MB limit: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/a30b56ebe76ffff9f9cc8a6667186179413c6349 https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/103 - s_nakamoto - 2010-07-15 Wish he would have left a better motivation.

Found via: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/98908/satoshi-introduced-the-1mb-block-size-limit-in-a-commit-why-did-andresen-make-a

Having a limit on the block size makes sense as a spam-mitigation measure. It means spammers need to out-bid non-spam transaction fees, which they are less likely to do when there is high demand for non-spam uses. So what Steve says about on-chain transaction fees not having to be that high is not valid.

Having small blocks makes it possible to have a much more decentralized network of validating nodes. (Since storage-costs are kept low).

Lightning Network has been over-hyped - people thinking it would solve scaling by itself, overlooking complexity of channel management, etc. But it is a very cool experiment I would say, it just needs more work. Not sure if having 3-4 different implementations has slowed things down through incompatibility-issues... probably a mixed bag. I've tried running my own node over Tor but recently switched to Phoenix, which works so much better, and is still non-custodial. Didn't have the time to sys-admin my node's channels.

It is disappointing that Bitcoin isn't being used more. Here is an example of usage: #832858 but they state their internet-connection is flaky, so I'm not sure whether they're on some kind of semi-offline-accounting system.

I think the issue might be that Ver and Patterson are less engineering-minded, so they don't weigh the importance of some aspects as heavily, and thereby end up with different conclusions.

This thing about Blockstream usurping control over Bitcoin... I think what happened was that Blockstream attracted many of the most talented engineers. They also tended to be small-blockers for the aforementioned spam and decentralization reasons. I think it's a case of correlation, not causation.

Happy to discuss specific points above or from the video that you find most convincing.